Blue Note

There are plenty of Blue Notes with distortion on the recording. Wayne Shorter's Juju, Jackie McLean's Destination Out and other mid 60s records, etc. All of those have a little sizzly distortion on the sax at points. There are plenty of Blue Notes that don't, too. I don't know what the difference is. Maybe some artists actually liked the distortion, thought it sounded hot or something?

Either way, yeah. I'm not totally convinced the OP's problem isn't actually on the tape. One way I check, if I have a question like this about an album I'm unfamiliar with, is to find a way to listen to it online. Yes, that means downloading torrents, and if the question of legality bothers you, it might not be for you. But when it comes to this usage at least, my conscience is clear. Or you can go on ebay or amazon and find cheap copies of the CDs of a few of these albums.

It also helps to keep a used record that you KNOW someone else damaged with a worn out stylus or poor setup, so you can throw it on in a situation like this and remind yourself of the difference in sound between distortion that's just recorded that way and groove damage. In my experience, it's extremely easy to find a copy of Led Zeppelin 4 with this kind of damage. By the time you get to the end of Stairway on a lot of copies, you'll just want to rip the record off the platter and do terrible things to it.

Anyway, good luck to the OP. These things can be extremely frustrating to figure out.

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